The invention relates to the integration of an optical chip built-in waveguide/detectors to an electronic chip via flip chip bonding.
The processing of information in telecommunication and data communication systems are normally divided into optical transport through optical fiber and electrical signal processing. At the network level of the interconnection hierarchy, optical transport provides a high capacity pipe through wavelength division multiplexing of parallel streams of different colors of light in the same fiber. The interconnection bottleneck is in the distribution of signals to the end user. At the chip level of the hierarchy, higher densities of smaller wires limit performance by increasing the RC time delay. This delay limits clock signal distribution for global synchronization and input/output (I/O) bandwidth at all levels of interconnection. Optical interconnection has no such limits. It is therefore, necessary to migrate key signal distributions functions from the electrical to the optical regime.